Timber Rock Railroad summary
The Timber Rock Railroad (TIBR) is a short line railroad in Texas and Louisiana that’s owned by Watco. A total of 41.5 miles of standard-gauge track from the former Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway is used between DeRidder, La., and Kirbyville, Texas.
History
The Timber Rock Railroad’s history began in 1983 when its parent company, Watco, was founded to obtain trackage rights to an industrial switching operation in DeRidder. Since then, more railroads were acquired and reformed under the company’s ownership. The Timber Rock Railroad was established by Watco in 1998 to purchase the BNSF Railway’s Oakdale Subdivision between DeRidder and Kirbyville as it provided cars for the Boise Cascade mill in DeRidder.
What happened next from 1998 became a series of expansion and depletion. In 2002, BNSF leased 100 miles of the Longview Subdivision to Timber Rock between Kirbyville and Tenaha, Texas. An additional 30 miles from the same subdivision was turned over in February 2004, allowing direct access to the Meade-Westvaco paper mill in Evadale, Texas. By the end of the year, the Timber Rock would then lease 100 miles of the BNSF’s Conroe Subdivision between Dobbins and Silsbee, Texas, with an additional 19 miles of the Silsbee Subdivision between Silsbee and Beaumont, Texas.
At its peak, the Watco short line was operating 290 miles of track in two states, along with 55 miles of trackage rights over BNSF. It was a peak that only lasted two years as the rise in rail traffic along the Gulf resulted in BNSF terminating the lease of the Conroe and Silsbee subdivisions on October 6, 2006. Lease agreements of the Longview Subdivision were terminated in 2017, reverting the Timber Rock back to its originally owned 41.5-mile line.
Operations
The Timber Rock Railroad’s main commodities in freight haulage is aggregates, lumber products, plastics, and fuel. It continues to serve Watco’s original customer of Boise Cascade in DeRidder.
As part of one of the largest companies in shortline operations, the Timber Rock uses Watco’s roster pool of vast diesel locomotives. Many units on the railroad carry the company’s black-and-yellow color scheme.
Interchange is made with the BNSF in Kirbyville and Kansas City Southern in DeRidder.
Read more about the Timber Rock Railroad in Trains’ April 2016 issue.
